City of Grudges

by Rick Outzen

  I needed to call Dare. No, I would visit her offices. This conversation needed to be face-to-face.

  Dare was the president of the Evans Timber & Land Company, the largest landowner in Northwest Florida after the US military, and the widow of Rory Evans. Rory had leveraged his family name, wealth, and superior intelligence to become the Florida Senate president by age 36. He had died nine years earlier of a massive heart attack while giving a speech on the Senate floor.

  The Evans dynasty didn’t skip a beat after Rory’s death. Dare took his place in Florida politics and the Northwest Florida business community. No one trifled with Dare Evans.

  As a wealthy widow, Dare was never criticized too harshly, either. She expressed her opinions and asserted her influence without fearing pushback from the country club wives. The whole of Pensacola society found no reason not to take her seriously—or if they did, they were too afraid to say it.

  Rory and Bo had grown up in the same neighborhood. Because the Hines and Evans families were close, he had been an usher in Hines’ weddings. Dare loved Sue, who ‘adopted’ her when she moved to Pensacola in 1991 to marry Rory, but she never liked Bo.

  “Too cocky,” Dare once told me. Still, Sue was her friend, and Dare cherished her friendships.

  My phone vibrated as I began to leave the Blanchard building. I needed another cup of coffee. The caller ID said “Dare Evans.”

  “Do . . . do you know what happened?” she asked. “I’ve tried to call the house and Jace. Nobody would pick up the phone.”

  “A deputy told me about it just as we were about to go into the courtroom,” I said. “How did you find out so quickly?”

  “I subscribe to the Herald’s web alerts. Walker, this is horrible.”

  “I’m so sorry, Dare. I know you two were close.”

  “She was a good friend.” Dare paused, and I didn’t rush to fill the silence. I did note it however. “The online article on the Herald’s website makes it sound like it could be suicide.”

  I said, “I haven’t had time to do anything. The daily rushed to break the story. But you need to prepare for the worse.”

  “Sue wouldn’t take her life, not Sue,” she shouted, her temper flaring. “She was upset about the trial, but she was convinced Bo would be found innocent. We had an unspoken rule not to talk about you, but she was fine when we had lunch on Monday.”

  “Dare, you never know what’s in someone’s mind, what’s happening behind closed doors—”

  “I knew Sue. She wasn’t suicidal, dammit.” After Dare interrupted me, she hung up.

  I should have consoled her, but my mind had jumped far past that. Like a dropped needle skipping over vinyl . . . scratch, thump . . . sheesh, I had already moved on to trying to figure out this puzzle and its impact on the trial.

  I tried to pull up the Herald website on my cell phone but couldn’t get service.

  It vibrated. Harden texted: “@ Breaktime.”

  The Breaktime Café was one block north of my office. It was 8:48 a.m. The runners had already pranced home or to their offices, but the bums were out rummaging through the trashcans. They nodded as I passed. They knew I was about as broke as they were.

  The heat was beginning to surpass the humidity. I perspired heavily as I walked into the cafe. A line of customers stood in front of the long counter that dominated the narrow space and waited for their lattes, mochas, and espressos. Many turned away as I called out to Bree, who manned the cash register. It would only get worse once they learned of Sue’s death.

  Bree smiled and handed me a large cup of house coffee. I didn’t know if she was happy to see me or only wanted to get me away from her other patrons.

  Bree wore an unbuttoned blue blouse over a stretched-to-its-limits yellow tube top. The shirt covered tattoos that the owner frowned upon, but the flowers and birds peeked out now and then. A devoted runner, Bree ran Palafox Street every afternoon at three. Men timed their afternoon breaks to see her bounce by their offices. She almost made me want to take running seriously and buy trendier athletic gear. Almost, but not quite.

  Jim Harden peeked around the corner from the back room when he heard my voice and waved me back. Bree winked and let me through. She and Jim had already figured out how to hide me away from the regular customers.

  Harden was Pensacola’s version of the Invisible Man. He was so nondescript and blended so well into any crowd that you had difficulty remembering where you last saw him. He was five foot ten, not too skinny or too fat, and odorless. Sometimes he wore wire-rimmed glasses. He was dressed in a light brown T-shirt and black slacks. Your eyes naturally passed over him when you scanned a room.

  A retired FBI agent, former Navy SEAL, and one of the more sought-after private investigators in Pensacola, Harden could dig up dirt on anybody. We hadn’t been on the same side of every issue, election, or referendum. You never quite knew who Harden was working for on any given day. Most of the information he shared was accurate, but you still needed to verify his tips.

  Harden had saved my ass a few times, and I had helped him disrupt the plans of a few mutual enemies. Though he denied it, I thought he had been paid a few times to follow and report on me. Trust was not part of our relationship, but it always paid to listen to Jim Harden.

  “You on top of Sue Hines’ death?” I asked as we sat down out of earshot of Bree and her customers.

  Harden nodded, “I listened to dispatch route the officers and EMS to the home and was on the scene when they hauled the body off. I thought you might want someone there, and I knew your staff probably hadn’t gotten out of bed yet.”

  “What did you learn?”

  “It was most likely a drug overdose,” Harden said. I always liked his directness, but this time I would have appreciated a warning.

  “Her husband called 9-1-1 after finding her on the floor of the bathroom off the master bedroom this morning at 7:25 a.m.,” said Harden leaning over a notepad next to his coffee cup to read the words written in tight, perfect cursive. “She was putting on her makeup and getting dressed for the trial.”

  Bo must have just gotten home from his television interview.

  “She died before the ambulance arrived.”

  “Damn,” I said. “Was there a note?”

  “The cops didn’t find one,” Harden said, still reviewing his notes. “Holmes, Mrs. Hines may have overdosed on Phenobarbital. The police found open prescription bottles in the bathroom. We will need to wait for the ME’s report.”

  “Sue took the drug for her epilepsy,” I said when Harden paused to see my reaction to his news. Sue had chaired the local epilepsy board of directors and openly talked about her seizures.

  I continued, “She has—had—been afflicted since eighth grade. It would be just like Sue to forget she had taken one dose and down another. Maybe it was accidental.”

  Harden looked down and sipped his coffee. He didn’t believe it was an accident but didn’t care enough to argue with me. He let me hold on to that ray of hope but only for a few sips.

  “The media will blame you, Holmes,” he said. “The state attorney might even ask for a delay in Hines’ trial. They are worried about finding open-minded jurors. Her death will be all over the media for the next two weeks. You forced their hand on this case. Hines pushed to get in court as quickly as possible, which has hampered the prosecutors who wanted more time to prepare for the trial. Some in the state attorney’s office would like to see it and you go away.”

  I didn’t say a word, just continued drinking my coffee. I felt everything slipping away—my newspaper, my friends, and my life.

  “I’m not going anywhere,” I said and stared into Harden’s eyes. “Maybe Bo will change his plea to guilty.”

  Harden half smiled. “You have always been a hard-ass.”

  I looked back at Harden as I left a tip on the table for Bree and walked toward the front door. “You let me know if you hear anything else.”

  As I turned the corner from the backroom,
I ran into Jace Wittman, Sue Hines’ stepbrother. His face looked weary and his blue dress shirt was untucked and wrinkled. His hair needed to be brushed. His goatee was unkempt.

  Before I could offer any condolences, Wittman hurled his vanilla latte at my head.

  “You son of a bitch,” he shouted. “You killed my sister.”

  I shielded my face, and most of the hot liquid scalded my arm. I smelled the vanilla and imagined my skin blistering.

  Wittman doubled me over with a punch to my exposed gut. Bree screamed for him to stop. I slipped and hit my head on the corner of a table. Harden blocked Wittman’s path and pushed him as he tried to deliver a kick to my ribs. They had been cracked one time too many and wouldn’t have taken the kick well.

  Even though he had twenty pounds on Harden, Wittman knew he was overmatched. He turned angrily and walked out of the cafe. Harden stayed with me. “You okay?” he asked. “We need to get that shirt off and see how much damage Wittman did. Want to call the cops?”

  I shook my head imagining that I felt my brain rattle around in my skull. I struggled to catch my breath and not show any emotion. Bree, Harden, and the customers stared down at me.

  “He must have come looking for you,” said Bree. “His eyes were glazed over when he walked in until he saw you. I thought he was going to kill you.”

  “I have that effect on people,” I said.

  She handed me a ziplock bag filled with ice for my head. When they got my shirt off, my left arm was pink, but the starched sleeve had repelled most of the coffee. There were no blisters. Funny how my writer’s imagination had gotten carried away. I also had a knot on the back of my head from the fall, but no other injuries.

  Bree gave me a kiss on the forehead and a green, red, yellow, and blue tie-dyed Breaktime T-shirt to wear. Harden walked with me back to the Insider office.

  It was a little after nine o’clock in the morning, and I’d already had my ass kicked and seen my chance for redemption possibly evaporate. Perfect.

  3

  The Insider staff would not be in the office until after ten. We had worked late into the night to get the issue finished. I had taken them out for beer and pizza afterwards and told them the staff meeting would be at 11:00 a.m.

  I went online to read the Herald’s article on Sue’s death, which had already been updated twice while I was at Breaktime. The Hines residence showed no sign of forced entry. Bo had come home from the television station and found Sue unresponsive in their master bathroom. Her stepbrother, Wittman, and his daughter lived with the Hineses. They were asleep in their rooms and had heard nothing. The police said they did not suspect foul play.

  Sue’s death was either health-related or a suicide. Neither possibility fit the Sue Hines I knew.

  Sue Eaton Hines had stood a full six feet tall—or “five foot twelve,” as she liked to say. She possessed such a radiant presence that when she walked into a room, conversation left it. You couldn’t take your eyes off her. Men, even the most confident players, forgot their names when she smiled at them.

  If she shook your hand, your knuckles popped. If she knew you well enough, she called you “sweetie” and might haul you off kayaking or sailing. Sue exuded health and vitality, looking thirty-five instead of fifty. When she laughed, it came out with a roar, filled with delightful, childlike innocence.

  Her curly red hair, green eyes, and light array of freckles on her nose and cheeks gave away her Irish heritage. But instead of a fiery temper, Sue had a warm way of scolding you that made you so ashamed you would instantly vow never to repeat the offense. She had scolded me often.

  Beautiful enough to live a step beyond convention, other women might comment about Sue that she spent too much time talking with their husbands and boyfriends at dinner parties, but they could do nothing about it. Men loved her because she liked to talk football, hunting and politics, but she wasn’t a flirt. You savored a conversation with her like a fine whiskey.

  Sue worshiped Bo. She had fallen in love with him when she was a sophomore at Pensacola Junior College and working in Dr. Lou Bowman’s office during summer break. Bo had been accepted into Florida State’s masters program and spent time that summer in Pensacola helping his grandparents. He also spent a lot of time with Sue. When she graduated from PJC, Sue enrolled in Florida State. Bo hung around Tallahassee an additional year and delayed his MBA so that he and Sue could both graduate in the spring of 1981.

  Up until my article about Bo appeared, she had called me “sweetie.” When the cops came to their North Hill home to arrest her husband in early April, she called my cell phone crying, “All Bo ever did was stand up for you when the rest of this town wanted you drummed out of Pensacola, and this is how you reward his friendship?”

  Before she hung up, Sue screamed, “He was your friend! Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”

  I didn’t say a word, and the phone went dead. That was the last time I heard her voice. And for weeks her words lingered, like cigarette smoke in my blazer after I had spent the night closing Intermission.

  The Pensacola Herald gave few other details of how Sue died. While the police told the reporter they didn’t suspect foul play, the officers also didn’t say natural causes. In other words, the wife of my one-time friend may have committed suicide. The article stated that friends said she had been distraught over her husband’s arrest, which the reporter added was caused by an audit prompted by allegations made by Insider publisher Walker Holmes. It also mentioned the trial was set to begin that morning and that I had refused to comment on her death.

  In other words, I pushed Pensacola’s most unlikely candidate for suicide to take her life.

  I knew all the public information officers at the Pensacola Police Department and the Escambia County Sheriff’s Office and they hated commenting on possible suicides. If a victim took his or her own life, the PIOs would file it away as such and tell the press off the record, “We don’t comment on suicides but, of course, that is up to the medical examiner to decide.”

  The official statement would be that law enforcement did not suspect any foul play and would wait for the medical examiner to perform the autopsy. The ME usually took four to five weeks before she issued a report, long enough for the suicide to be a nonstory.

  The Herald allowed readers to comment on articles. The first few posted below the article on Sue’s death offered condolences to Bo, his grandparents, and Sue’s stepbrother, Jace Wittman. The next thirty-five anonymous comments attacked me:

  WallyTaxesRanger: “Does Walker Holmes have an alibi?”

  JollyRoy: “Holmes is the one who needs to be arrested. He killed her, even if he didn’t pull a trigger.”

  SallyBeach: “The so-called reporter is a backstabbing jerk. Hines should sue him for everything he has. Hines will own his tabloid.”

  And those were the kindest comments about me. The Herald didn’t moderate its website. More comments meant more hits and more ad revenue. They could have at least given me a commission.

  I put on a new button-down shirt and headed to Dare’s offices at Jackson Tower. The one block walk was one of the most difficult I had traveled in quite some time. She was expecting me to tell her more about Sue’s death. I wouldn’t do it in an email or over the phone.

  Evans Timber & Land Company owned Jackson Tower, which loomed at the end of Palafox Street and overlooked Pensacola Bay. In 1903 it was the tallest building in Florida, the state’s first twelve-story skyscraper. Only two taller buildings had been built in Pensacola since then.

  When I got off the elevator, I nodded at the young receptionist and walked through a maze of cubicles filled with real estate agents and back to the corner office.

  Dare’s office had a spectacular view of Pensacola Bay. One could see Pensacola Beach, the Gulf of Mexico, and the Naval Air Station in the distance. An enormous Oriental rug covered the floor. One wall had mahogany bookcases filled with books, many of them first editions signed by Robert Penn Warren, Eudora Welty, Tr
uman Capote, Harper Lee, Margaret Mitchell, and other Southern writers. Dare liked to tease me that she had a spot for my first novel.

  Behind her massive desk hung a portrait of Rory, smiling like he owned the Gulf Coast—which he did. Under the portrait was a silver tray with bottles of Jack Daniels and Cutty Sark and a set of crystal glasses. Next to the tray was Rory’s most prized possession, the football from Ole Miss’s 1969 Sugar Bowl victory over Arkansas, autographed by Coach Johnny Vaught and Archie Manning.

  The three of us had met for the first time at the University of Mississippi. Rory had been a first-year law student. Dare and I were freshmen.

  I was the first in my family to attended college, hailing from the Mississippi Delta town of Belzoni, the “Catfish Capital of the World.” I would have gone to Mississippi Delta Junior College in nearby Moorhead or Delta State University like my classmates who didn’t immediately enlist in the military or work on their parents’ farm out of high school, but Ole Miss had offered me an academic scholarship. My parents drove me to Oxford in the family station wagon and told me they would return to pick me up at Thanksgiving break.

  Dare had graduated from St. Agnes Academy, a private Roman Catholic, all-girls high school in Memphis, the same school that Priscilla Presley attended while Elvis Presley courted her. Dare’s father was a corporate attorney for Holiday Inn and a running back on Johnny Vaught’s undefeated 1962 football team, and her mother was a former Ole Miss homecoming queen.

  We met at a Pi Kappa Alpha pledge swap. Somehow I had ended up the pledge class president of the fraternity. Dare held the same position with the Chi Omegas. We launched the pledge toga party and ducked out to drink beer at the Gin, one of the few bars in Oxford that kept its kitchen open past nine o’clock on Monday nights. Over burgers and fried mushrooms, we talked for hours about William Faulkner, Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Carter, and how we were going to change the South.